Brian Spears

Poetic Lives Online

2010-01-30T20:58:00.001-05:00

Philip Pullman writes about Blake's poetry, and argues that it can be appreciated separate from the illuminations.

Thermos interviews Katy Lederer, who we reviewed nearly a year ago.

Anindita Sengupta on Indian English Poetry.

Inferno, the video game. It's Dante in the same way "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" is Homer. Except it's a video game. And Beatrice is in hell.

More on gender, race and poetry in this post at Harriet. And some good advice as well--advice I plan on taking as Poetry Editor here.

And on that note, would you like to write about poetry for The Rumpus? What was the last book or poem you loved? Send me a write-up, no length requirements, and I'll publish the best of them. poetry-at-therumpus-dot-net.

Brian Spears

Poetic Lives Online

2010-01-23T19:28:00.001-05:00

It's Saturday night and it's poetry time. Who else is excited?

I always figured the Irish got excited about poetry. Roddy Doyle says otherwise.

I'm late to the game in discovering the Poetry Foundation's podcasts, but I'm having some fun listening to them. I liked Ron Silliman's discussion of writing a poem with an eraser, as well as Carmine Starnino's "Are Poets Lazy Bastards?"

41 popular moves in contemporary poetry.

I'm double-dipping a little here, as Elisa Gabbert helped on the above link, but I really liked this piece from her website on publishing the poem, not the poet.

John Gallaher asks what it means to be a careerist in poetry.

Twitter recommendation for this week is January Magazine. They do more than just poetry--sometimes they just tweet news story links--but they're very active and informative.

Brian Spears

An Arundel Tomb

2010-01-18T21:26:00.000-05:00

Twice now, in the last couple of months, I've come across media pieces on Philip Larkin's "An Arundel Tomb" (which is on my Interpretation of Poetry syllabus for this week), first on BBC4 radio, which is sadly not available online at present, and then today on the Poetry Foundation website--they tweeted it and I followed the link because I really, really like this poem. The funny thing is, neither piece talked about the reason I like the poem, namely, the statement I think Larkin makes about nostalgia.

Let me start by saying it's perfectly possible that the reason none of these other people mention nostalgia is because it's so obvious and they're interested in other matters. I haven't read any Larkin criticism; for all I know, there's a book on the way Larkin dealt with nostalgia. But I'm going to blather on about it anyway.

The poem begins with a description of the tomb of the Earl of Arundel and his wife Eleanor in Chichester Cathedral. The Earl and the Countess are side by side atop the tomb, holding hands, he dressed in armor and she in what looks like a nun's habit, and there are dogs beneath their feet. Larkin describes the effect of seeing the hand-holding as a "sharp tender shock," an unexpected display of affection given that noble marriages from the medieval period weren't typically romantic affairs. (Larkin later mourned that he'd gotten this detail wrong, that these two by all accounts did have an affectionate relationship--doesn't matter, though, since the surprise is the important thing.)

He plays on this a bit in the following stanza:

They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor's sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.

Larkin is punning on the word "lie" here; the whole idea of an elaborate tomb is to make one's name last far into the future, so he can't be talking about their physical bodies. No, it seems to me that, because he distrusts the image of the two as a loving couple, he assumes that their hand-holding would be "just a detail friends would see," and they would write it off to "a sculptor's sweet commissioned grace" and nothing more. The important information, from the Earl and Countess's point of view, would be the "Latin names around the base," not any memory of the romance (or lack thereof) between the inhabitants of the tomb.

Larkin moves this "lie" forward in time and shows how it becomes a truth of sorts, as "succeeding eyes begin / To look, not read." Future observers who were unable to read the Latin names or were unable to contextualize them would only see the lie of the loving couple. Tourists would visit the cathedral, "Washing at their identity" until all that was left was the image itself, a man of war and his wife, his ungauntleted hand holding hers in this unusual moment of tenderness.

So when Larkin opens his final stanza with the words "Time has transfigured them into / Untruth," he's talking about how we look back into the past and see only the rosy parts. We wash away anything disturbing (whenever we can) and so this medieval couple, who one would assume married to unite powerful families or consolidate land gains are now a symbol for love that lasts through time. That's what Larkin is getting at in his final line, "What will survive of us is love." The Latin names didn't make it (in the sense that they don't signify anything to most people who see the tomb), nor did any stories of what their relationship truly was like. All that was left was the statue. What survives of them is love, whether it really existed or not.

But that's the thing about memory and nostalgia. It's completely unreliable. It washes away the ugliness, the grit and crap, and makes things seem prettier, simpler than they ever could have been. The love that survived, that will survive us, will be a lie, not because it isn't love, but because it will be devoid of context and strife, of any of the dirt that has to be part of any relationship. The notion that we should not speak ill of the dead is one manifestation of this phenomenon. We remember only the good parts, only the beauty, only the love.

Wow

2010-01-13T22:20:00.000-05:00

So I've been blogging at The Rumpus and Incertus about the Haiti earthquake response, instead of prepping for classes tomorrow like I ought to have been--it's too early in the semester to get behind, after all--but about midway through my marathon session, I was forwarded this incredibly wonderful post from Don Share at Harriet. If saying it didn't automatically negate it, I would say I am humbled by his words.

Poetic Lives Online

2010-01-10T10:44:00.002-05:00

Happy Saturday everyone.

So Missouri Governor Jay Nixon wants a Poet Laureate for the state who doesn't have anything in his or her background that might embarrass him. I take it he doesn't know many poets.

Connecticut is looking for a Poet Laureate too. No word on embarrassment restrictions.

Did you miss the off-site MLA poetry reading? You can get an .mp3 of it here.

Catherine Halley reports from the Key West Literary Seminar, which is experiencing, I'm sad to say, the least Key-Westian weather in recent memory.

And my Twitter follow recommendation this week is the poet Gabrielle Calvocoressi, author of The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart and Apocalyptic Swing. I've been interviewing Gabrielle for The Rumpus and Twitter is a big part of it.

Brian Spears

Crossposted to The Rumpus

First Impressions: George Witte's Deniability

2010-01-02T23:43:00.000-05:00

I should have loved this book, I think. I agree with Witte's politics, and my own writing tends toward the metrically formal, which Witte does quite ably throughout Deniability.

And yet...maybe I would have loved this book three years ago, which is when I suspect most of the poems were written, or at least inspired. The cover image is Fernando Botero's "Abu Ghraib 66" and the second section is made of poems about rendition, torture, and the various justifications the nation's leaders made for the actions our military took during that time frame. The third section deals with surveillance and an allegorical figure named "Suspicion."

I'm sure the issue is one of fatigue for me--I've spent more time on political blogs for the last five years than is good for one's mental stability--and I don't want to ascribe this to Witte's poems, but when I read "Failure to Comply," about a set-to at an airport security checkpoint, I find myself not caring, not about the subject nor the poem itself. And that's not fair to Witte or his art.

There are moments where Witte's poems transcend the immediate subject matter--the first section is full of them, and I really enjoyed "Likenesses," which contained this moment:

"So much of who we are," he said, "depends
on markers humans recognize as us."
I recalled our daughter Helen
shying from my stroke-strange mother's kisses,
two years enough to discern alien
in familiar guise.

Even though the poem begins with a specialist who helps repair the faces of people harmed in war, Witte makes the poem more familiar here, and his decision to move away from the strict iambic pentameter he'd been using really brings this moment into focus--the two year old who saw something not-quite-human in her grandmother's face and shied away.

I won't be reviewing this for The Rumpus--I'm passing it on to another reviewer, and I hope she can give it a better chance than I did.

Poetic Lives Online

2010-01-02T22:50:00.001-05:00

First thing: Chinese poet Lu Xiaobo has been sentenced to eleven years in prison. There isn't much people can do, but you can register your opinion on this via the PEN American Center website.

Mark Scroggins has inspired me to keep better track of how much poetry I read. Not sure if that's what he was going for, but that's what happened.

Gary Barwin comments on what he calls the cage match of Canadian poetry and wonders "why we can’t have both approaches as part of a vital and active poetry world." Other than "both" buttressing a dichotomic view of poetic options, I agree with him. I think of myself as a poetic populist--room for everyone in the pool.

Alex Beam suggests libraries could help kill the e-book by lending them out. He couldn't be more wrong.

My Twitter follow recommendation for this week is @rattlepoetry, the feed of Rattle. It's a journal which is using the web as an addition to their print journal, and they use it well.

Crossposted to The Rumpus

Tracking my Reading

2010-01-01T16:35:00.000-05:00

For a long time I thought I read a lot--and I did, compared to the people I was an undergrad with, and among my friends while I was a Witness. Then I got to grad school, and even though I was reading more then than I ever had before, I came to realize that I was a piker, at least when it came to the subject I was studying.

I was reading Mark's post on bulk-reading and beating myself up over my lax habits when it occurred to me that I don't really know how much I read in a given year. I'm not in Mark's league, not by a long shot, but I probably do a better job than I give myself credit for, especially since I started getting books as part of my editor's gig at The Rumpus.

So since I've been looking for ways to use this blog more, I'm going to shamelessly jack an idea from Michael Kelleher and modify it--I'll post what I'm reading and keep count of it. This will be my New Year's Resolution, to keep track of how much and how varied my reading is. And I'll be glad to take suggestions from anyone who passes by and leaves them in the comments.

So right now, I'm in the middle of a couple of books, not counting the two I have to reread in order to review soon. The first is City Dogs by W.S. DiPiero, his latest collection of essays, and I've been at this one for a couple of months, reading a snatch here and there and then ruminating on it for days. I love DiPiero's writing, and have ever since I worked with him at Stanford, and I did some scanning and conversion to text work for him when he was putting this together, so I have a closer connection with some of the content than I would normally have.

The second is Seamus Heaney's new translation of The Testament of Cresseid and Seven Fables, which I've been reading occasionally before I go to bed. I could just blow through this one, but again, I've been taking it a fable at a time. Heaney's translation is fine, but not inspired, or maybe it's the subject matter--morality tales get a little heavy-handed at their best, and when I read them one after another, I start to feel like I do when I read Very Intense Bloggers Writing About Very Important Things, and I tune out. The rhythms of the lines don't vary enough to counteract the occasional creeping numbness, which is why I don't read much of it in a sitting.

So that's two, and I'll update when I finish one and get into another.

Book count: 2

Stealing Books

2009-12-28T10:24:00.002-05:00

Via The Rumpus, Margo Rabb has a funny piece in the NY Times about book theft. As anyone with a wry sense of humor might expect, the Bible is the most-stolen book around, even in Christian book stores (where it might be the only thing worth reading).

These paragraphs near the end got me thinking a little, though, in large part because my own book is being published (fingers crossed) in 2010, and though I doubt there's going to be much of an issue with digital piracy--I can only hope that I'm in demand enough that people would want to steal it--I am interested in using the web as a marketing tool for my work.

Many publishers and authors fear that piracy, and the general transition from print to digital media, will cause irreparable harm to the book industry, as it has in the music world. The writer Sherman Alexie, who has refused to make his fiction available in digital form, agrees. “The open source culture is coming for us,” he told me, “and there’s nothing we can do to stop it.”

John Palfrey, a co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and the author of “Born Digital,” is more optimistic. “The way young people enjoy music is very different from the way they enjoy books, and I don’t think that we’ll see the same pattern of piracy emerge that we’ve seen in the music industry — at least not in the near future,” he said.

There's little doubt in my mind that the transition will force the publishing industry to evolve, and that the companies which currently dominate the landscape will mostly fail to do so. The companies will survive in some form or another, but they'll be the IBM's of a generation ago--once-powerful, now an afterthought.

Palfrey is correct--for now--that the way young people (and middle-agers too, for the record) access music is different from the way they enjoy books, but that's going to change, and I think the switchover will come when e-book readers become textbooks for schoolchildren. Adult readers stick to books now because that's what we're comfortable with. Read the arguments against e-books and one place they always hit is the tactile sensation of turning pages, of the smell of the paper and ink, the must of age in the cover. You lose all that with an e-book, absolutely. But if you've never really had it? If your first book was a child-proof Kindle or Nook or Tablet? Then a paper book will be a curiosity, but it won't evoke the same emotional attachment it does for us.

And once that's the expected way of accessing books, then piracy will grow quickly. We have a generation of people who are adults now who may have never accessed music other than via a computer, and we're getting that way with movies. The DVD has a top end life span, I'd wager, of ten years, even with the introduction of HD versions. Streaming delivery is the model of the future. So why not with books?

That's why I'm interested in making my book available in digital format, even if I never sell a copy that way. I'd like it to be open-source, though my publisher will no doubt have objections to that--but whatever agreement we come to, I want it to be available on as many readers as possible (so no Amazon-proprietary format no matter what happens). For the current generation of young people, and the ones that follow them, if it's not online, it doesn't exist. Writers have to acknowledge that--Sherman Alexie is right when he says open-source is coming for all of us, and that we can't stop it. The question is how we engage with it.

One thing publishers need to do in order to survive this evolutionary moment is do a better job of selling the costs of publishing. The music industry failed badly in this respect because it allowed the frame of "a blank CD costs pennies; why does a music CD cost 17 bucks?" to become the focus of the debate. The fact that the record companies exploit new artists horribly and that they were raking in billions of dollars while churning out some of the least interesting music ever didn't help much, but where they really failed was in making the case that producing songs is expensive, even if you don't see it in the end product.

Publishers need to make the same case. Right now, the argument goes that a digital download costs next to nothing compared to a printed book--therefore, a digital download ought to cost next to nothing. And for some books, namely, those in the public domain, I agree completely. But making books--and I'm not taking about the physical making here; I'm talking about the writing and editing and formatting and selling of books--is expensive. But most readers don't get that, because the costs are hidden, and because they haven't actually tried to do it themselves, they have no idea how hard a job it is. I've never done a job as tedious as copy-editing, and I worked in a grocery warehouse pulling cases for 3 years.

Publishers have to pay people to do these jobs, and those of us in the industry would like to earn a living wage doing it. And in order to do that, publishers have to set a price point for electronic books that's higher than the average person might expect. Amazon hasn't helped matters with its Wal-Mart-esque bullying of publishers, but in the end, it's publishers who control the content, and right now, the market is malleable enough that they can still exert some control if they're willing to fight for it. And one of the ways they can do that is by making the case that there's value in the book itself, regardless of the format. Don't ask me how--I'm not a marketer. I don't even expect to make more than beer money off this book. But I know this is where we're heading, and if publishers want to thrive, they'll have to find a way to convince people to buy their books.

Poetic Lives Online

2009-12-26T17:00:00.002-05:00

Hi everyone. I sort of took today off along with everyone else here at The Rumpus, but there was a lot of good stuff in the po-world this week and I wanted to pass it along.

For starters, Memorious launched their blog today, and their first official post is "what books we're looking forward to in 2010," which is a wonderful change from all the retrospective lists that pop up this time of year. Forward looking--I like that.

Speaking of forward looking, Identity Theory wonders about the purpose of literary journals in the internet era, especially those who are usign the web in a merely perfunctory way.

The Poetry Foundation is doing a retrospective of sorts, though it's more about how poetry has changed over the last ten years. I personally found the responses by Annie Finch, Rigoberto Gonzáles and Camille Dungy to be the most on point and interesting, but they're all worth reading.

Finally, this week's Twitter follow recommendation. Two of the biggest daily poetry websites out there are Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, but I tend to only remember to look at the former on a regular basis. Why? Because Poetry Daily has a Twitter feed, and they update regularly, without being obnoxious about it. What do you say, Verse Daily? Will you get on the Twitter Train? (If they already are, someone send me a link, because I'd love to follow them.)

Brian Spears

Crossposted at The Rumpus

Major changes are afoot

2009-12-18T00:31:00.002-05:00

I haven't updated this blog since August, and it's been two weeks since I updated Incertus--obviously, something has to give. Right now, I'm doing a major redesign on the personal website, and I've managed to successfully import this blog into it--for now. I plan to redesign the blog as well, and include a twitter feed and cross-post some Rumpus stuff as well. I'd been limiting this blog to only poetry and writing related posts, but that's likely to change once I get the technical side of things ironed out--expect some goofy videos at the very least.

I'll be updating the blog roll as well, though how extensively will depend on just how fancy I can get with the blog. If I have to stay with a classic template, I'll have very limited options.

Incertus will likely be shuttered for now, and I'll be asking people to update their blog rolls accordingly. I'll try to work out a redirect if I can. When I started that blog nearly six years ago, I did it under a pseudonym because I was worried about harming my job prospects. It didn't take me long to discover that my pseudonym wasn't all that effective. I'm not saying it cost me a chance at a job--I don't think it did, and I've never been asked not to blog by my current employers, though I've been more than a little over the top at times--I'm just saying that it's pretty clear that any bloggers who think they have anonymity online are fooling themselves. All it takes is one determined jerk who doesn't respect your desire to stay anonymous and you're outed. The reality is that the second you engage the online world, you sacrifice some privacy. If you're not willing to do that, better stay off the web, not to mention any social networks, no matter how exclusive.

I built up an audience using that pseudonym, which is why I continued to use it even when my identity was clear--it was a way to separate myself from all the other Brians out there, and I may continue to use it on some of the websites where I comment. But to the extent I blog, I'll be doing it under my own name now

Neglectful

2009-08-06T23:48:00.003-04:00

I update this site far too rarely. I am a bad personal blogger, I suppose. But anyway, two sites to bring attention to. The first is a new blog by a dear friend of mine from Stanford, Shara Lessley. She's apparently going to be moving to Jordan in a year, and her blog is going to talk a bit about her preparations for the trip, as well as the issues with a completely unfamiliar language.

Secondly, a new online journal I found not long ago (and immediately submitted to). It's called Redheaded Stepchild and their requirement for submission is that your poems have to have been rejected by someone else, and they want to know who passed on them. You might ask, why would anyone want another journal's castoffs? A few years ago, The Missouri Review did an issue on all the great stuff Knopf had rejected--including classics like Lolita. There are so many reasons why a journal might reject a poem, from being overfull to the poetry reader just having a bad day and refusing everything that came in, that there's a good chance that someone else's castoffs will make a fine journal. Here's hoping they like my offerings.

A Quiz: Vogon Poetry or Flarf

2009-06-29T22:07:00.004-04:00

My last post talked about the Vogon Poetry app for the iPhone. Vogon poetry, if you're familiar with The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, is considered the third-worst poetry in the universe. Flarf has come to be known--by one definition anyway--as intentionally bad poetry.

Flarf got the main(stream) stage this month with its inclusion in Poetry alongside conceptual writing and Poetry's regular fare, and when reading it, I saw what I thought were some similarities between Flarf and Vogon poetry. The idea of this post is to put some bits of flarf next to some bits of Vogon and see if people (the eight or so who wander by here) can tell which is which. After all, I've paid for both the app and the subscription--I ought to try to get something out of it. Answers will be at the end of the post.

1. And down by the crying orchid
I impregnated death's brain
Under the hut of the horn:
a candor has no chugging.

2. An apple on my ninja.
Alas! Yet I destructed. I vowed.
If a towel is harmless, can a gravy be extinct?
It was only reading from soy to soup.

3. Glitter is the Swiss Army knife
of the most bedazzlingly ridiculous
emotions: the part just before
the paranoid cheese-maker says,

"Whatever you do in Palm Springs,
don't yodel"

4. Thanks, puncture, for tumbling the reason,
I get to win for another look.
Who was more not particularly good
on that moist mistake?
You who is slurping, or me who ponders you?

5. April 22 is a nice day. I really like it.
I mean it's not as fantastic as that Hitler
unicorn ass but it's pretty special to me.
CREAMING bald eagle there is a tiny Abe
Lincoln boxing a tiny Hitler. MAGIC UNICORNS

6. The 4th quarter gets pretty intense and the announcers are usually trying to figure out who is going to become overwhelmed by their own arrogant nightmares. It would upset the stomach of the balance of nature. I always go red over the stupidest things and I have no clue why. Whether it's speaking in front of the class or someone asking me why I think I have the right to say anything.

7. O limp steam,
my creative Mainframes to me, and to all sofas--
Are as an informational
INCOMPETENCE
Upon positive hermits; turned, moistly.

And scantily and snootily the filth constructed
Evervate where the hermits restrain
Round an asteroid there tortuously,
The knuckle of candor.

The Vogon poems are constructed by the app, which claims that no two poems are alike. I don't know what algorithms are being used to ensure that, though in some of the examples I didn't include, the program uses nonsense words similar to the kind Douglas Adams used in The Hitchiker's Guide. A linguist could probably give you details about the way those words are built--all I can tell you is that they sound similar. My point is that those words are undoubtedly part of the process to ensure difference in the poems. But overall, the poems tend to read like a Mad Lib combined with a random word generator.

So there's certainly some difference in the construction of the Vogon poems as opposed to Flarf, but what about the finished product? Both are intentionally bad. Does that make Vogon poetry a machine-built Flarf? Does the generator get recognition as the poet or does the programmer? I'm not a Flarfist so I'm not going to speak for them, but it does seem like it's a question worth discussing.

By the way, the answers, for those of you who haven't seen the very limited selection of Flarf that Poetry published, are 1,2,4, and 7 are Vogon and 3,5 and 6 are Flarf.

Vogon Poetry

2009-06-20T12:06:00.003-04:00

I dare say I'm not the only iPhone owner who's also a fan of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy--the book, not the film. Smartphones in general seem to be turning into the technology Douglas Adams envisioned all those years ago, and while they may not (yet) provide you with an introduction to Eccentrica Gallumbits of Eroticon Six, they can provide something infinitely more bothersome. Vogon Poetry.

I dropped the three bucks for this app last night, mainly because I saw it and figured, "eh, three bucks." That's a coffee in a lot of places. And it gave me this in return.

Eternity, spark, and morass — the code of the oracle:
To ruefully plummet, or at least salivate enormously with SUGARS,
Don’t suppress my lagoon!
Don’t get my leviathan dreamed of!

The tyrant’s asteroids are hard,
And mucus is like the yellow liquor;
The mainsheets are become ascended, the vow is impersonated by a pickings:
May’st it yet theorize the cold eye-patch.

RABBITS are brawny, hooks are red.
On either delight the pillar breaks cleverly;
monastic pilots of field and of spatter
That endures the cutter and maroons the scallywag;
And through the narwhal the sailor goes by
To ruefully-gaff rigginged document;

Ostensibly and wickedly went the treasure,
risible galaxies and depressed ropes for to pull,
fomenting me with me a most pink captain, well!
Hard, sane mirage!!! That’s what a liquid’s life is about! Phooey!

And haltingly and surreptitiously the driftwood ambled.
Pull where the destructors keelhaul
Round a donation there externally,
The mongrel of faith.

Or that the limes, the supernovae of old
Could but follow their cuttlefishes;
And peculiar in the drunk-CONSTRUCTED cuttlefish
They remain as they were, breathtaking and sadistic.

The app gives you eight different modes to choose from, and promises no two poems will ever be the same. They could be lying, I guess--after all, who could read enough Vogon poetry to challenge the claim?

Crossposted to The Rumpus

On Poetry Reviews

2009-06-06T15:49:00.002-04:00

I like Don Share's take on the issue of poetry reviews mostly because he doesn't try to stake out a "my way is the only way to look at this" position. That appeals to me populist side.

I’m not advocating weeding out the bad from the good in poetry or in anything else; my good is your bad, and vice versa. But one has to know the physiology nonetheless. That’s my point, and in fact I’ve argued elsewhere for the great and enduring value of very bad poetry (which I read in enormous quantities). But I think there’s much to assent to in Joel’s remarks, particularly with regard to “civil society,” which does seem to be vanishing (like sherry-drinking and dressing gowns)… assuming it ever existed, that is.

As I've written here before, I try to stay away from "good" and "bad" when it comes to poetry. I talk more about what I like and what I dislike, what moves me and what doesn't, what I'm able to communicate with and what I feel sealed off from, but I don't like making value judgments about poetry in general because tastes vary, and what I find cold and hermetic may seem vibrant and inclusive to another reader.

When it comes to reviews, I approach the matter from two very different perspectives. When I'm writing a review, I stick with stuff I appreciate. I'm one of those people who will pass on doing a review before writing a negative one. I understand the criticism of taking such a stand, and I'll take the hit, I guess, but I'm not willing to hit another poet for doing something with language that doesn't appeal to me. I'd rather spend my time and effort pointing out poets who are doing stuff I find interesting, who appeal to my aesthetic, who I can communicate with in new and interesting ways. I'm just not a basher when it comes to artistic matters--the number of people who read poetry is already small enough without turning more people off by being dicks to each other.

As Poetry Editor of The Rumpus, though, I have a different approach. For starters, I'm willing to talk to anyone who wants to write a review for me. I won't promise publication, but I'll definitely take a look at your style and see if it fits our mode. If you look at the poetry reviews we've published over the last few months, you'll find that they're largely positive, and even the ones that are less so point out something positive in the writing. I haven't published a completely negative review (though I haven't really been faced with the possibility yet), but I'm not completely opposed to doing it, as long as I feel the review approaches the work honestly and as long as I don't think the reviewer is looking to settle an old score or make it a hate letter. That's a fine line, and I'm sure that at some point I'll publish a review that does just that, and then I'll feel the need to apologize for it. That's the editor's life, though, unless you're only going to publish love letters.

The big challenge for me so far has been making sure that my reviews reflect the diversity of voices in the poetry world, and while I've been trying, I won't say that I've succeeded. I'd like to have more women reviewing for me, as well as people of color, and I'd love to have more books by women and people of color reviewed here. That challenge has made me reach out to communities I'd neglected to in recent years, much to my own loss, and I've really enjoyed both the poets I've discovered and the communication I've had with them as a result.

I'm also trying to get reviews of and by people whose aesthetic I don't share, because the last thing I want The Rumpus to be known for is a single, limited set of voices. I'd love to publish advocates for poetry I don't get, because I'd like to get what they're doing, and I work from the assumption that the problem is mine, and not the poet's.

Padel v. Walcott

2009-05-26T22:35:00.004-04:00

By now it's old news that Ruth Padel has resigned her position as Oxford Professor of Poetry a week after she took the job. She came under fire because she supposedly lied about her involvement in the campaign against Derek Walcott. I refuse to call it a smear campaign as some others have because calling it so would make it seem as if the charges against Walcott were unfounded; the opposite is true. Walcott has been busted at least twice, once at BU and once at Harvard, so reminding the voters at Oxford (which is what I believe Padel was referring to when she said she wasn't involved in the campaign against Walcott) is hardly "dirty pool".

Is a history of sexual harassment enough to disqualify a person from holding such a prominent post? Some of these people say no.

Prof [Hermione] Lee said Byron and Keats would not have been ruled out of such a post: “We are acting as purveyors of poetry not of chastity.”

Elleke Boehmer, Professor of World Literature at Oxford, said the anonymous packages were “creepy and unsettling”.

“If we started excluding people on the basis of their peccadilloes there would be no one for us to teach,” she said.

James Fenton, a former professor of poetry at Oxford University, said: “Who but the most bigoted would think that professional issues settled a quarter of a century ago should debar a poet from standing up at a lectern three times a year to give a public lecture on poetry? Who thinks Oxford’s reputation has been enhanced by this unscruplousness?”

To Professor Lee I say only that Keats was a man of his times, and if he were living today, we would have different expectations of him. To Professor Boehmer, I reply that sexual harassment is far more than just a peccadilloe--if Walcott wanted to dress up in a diaper, I wouldn't have an issue with his candidacy. And to Professor Fenton, I suggest he may want to look at the record again. The first public charge came over a quarter century ago, but there have been others since then. That's a pattern of conduct.

It may sound at this point like I'm ready to dump Derek Walcott into the dustbin of poetic history--I'm not. But I am suggesting that his supporters have been far too dismissive of the case against him, and that Walcott could have defused some of this furor by facing up to the charges and apologizing publicly. Had he done so, he'd probably have won the post in a walk, his critics would have been silenced, and his supporters wouldn't be reduced to making such ludicrous argument in his defense.

In the end, no one wins here. Walcott is still Walcott, Padel is still the first woman to hold the post, but for perhaps the shortest tenure ever, and whoever winds up with the post will be remembered, if at all, as the third choice who was brought in to clean up the mess. And neat, tidy types don't leave a memorable mark, generally speaking.

Oh great

2009-05-23T18:58:00.001-04:00

Another page I'll have to keep with reading regularly.

Lots of truth in this

2009-05-08T14:23:00.001-04:00

Wislawa Symborska, via Poetry Dispatch:

To Mr. Br. K. of Laski: “Your poems in prose are permeated by the figure of the Great Poet who creates his remarkable works in a state of alcoholic euphoria. We might take a wild guess at whom you have in mind, but it’s not last names that concern us in the final analysis. Rather, it’s the misguided conviction that alcohol facilitates the act of writing, emboldens the imagination, sharpens wits, and performs many other useful functions in abetting the bardic spirit. My dear Mr. K., neither this poet, nor any of the others personally known to us, nor indeed any other poet has ever written anything great under the unadulterated influence of hard liquor. All good work arose in painstaking, painful sobriety, without any pleasant buzzing in the head. ‘I’ve always got ideas, but after vodka my head aches,’ Wyspianski said. If a poet drinks, it’s between one poem and the next. This is the stark reality. If alcohol promoted great poetry, then every third citizen of our nation would be a Horace at least. Thus we are forced to explode yet another legend. We hope that you will emerge unscathed from beneath the ruins.”

Indeed. Go read the whole collection, especially if you teach creative writing. It might become your textbook.

Sweet Jeebus

2009-05-01T00:35:00.008-04:00

National Poetry Month is over. Whew. I actually squeezed out the 30 poems in 30 days, no cheating or using previously written material. I'll admit, there have been years where I haven't produced thirty drafts of poems, good or bad, and that can't continue. It's the most condensed period of writing I've ever done, and it was tough given the end of the term and the new responsibilities I took on over at The Rumpus. It's been brutal at times, and I will admit that not all of what I wrote will likely survive to be revised or sent out. But it was a good exercise all the same, and one I plan to repeat more than once in the coming year.

So now starts the task of revision, submission, and putting together another manuscript. It never ends, and I'm glad for it.

P.S. Ive tried posting this for five days now. Here's hoping it works tonight.

Challenge: Haiku

2009-04-21T14:43:00.002-04:00

Today's prompt at Poetic Asides was haiku, a form I've never been fond of. I never quite knew why I wasn't fond of it--it was more a visceral thing for me--but Jim Murdoch has outlined some pretty good reasons for disliking it, at least as it's generally understood. I'm going to take a longer look at what he's talking about, though, because there's some promise in futching with the form, I think.

But for this exercise, I stuck with the tradition, even if it's a messed up one, and the subject matter is the thing that's overwhelming me at the moment--the last week and a half of the Spring semester here at Our Fair University.

Haikus for the last week of classes

The end of Spring term:
my ambient noise setting
is Buddhist morning.

I'd rather sweep, mop,
pull weeds, sift the litter box,
than grade these essays.

It's raining today,
though not the rainy season.
No escape for me.

Coffee wakes me up
but the dose necessary
makes my comments poor.

Squirrel in the palm
looks in my window, chitters,
mocks. Hawk swooping by.

Alone in the class,
I count the minutes, seconds,
'til the bus is due.

My first flarf?

2009-04-17T18:36:00.003-04:00

This is written as part of the Poetic Asides National Poetry Month writing challenge. I wasn't all that into the prompt, and this came out, perhaps a bit snarkier than I intended, but there it is.

All I want is

peace love and understanding
and this lamp,
the breeze off the ocean,
noise putty,
a loaf of bread, a jug of wine,
more hair (except on my back),
sharks with fricking laserbeams attached to their heads,
a pair of really comfortable shoes,
Boo-Berry,
an iPhone rolling on twenty-twos,
the question for which 42 is the answer,
less foot pain,
the movie rights,
forgiven student loans,
more visitors to my blog,
a cup of coffee that tastes as good as it smells,
Velveeta.

If flarf is intentionally bad poetry, then I think this qualifies, though it certainly wouldn't be my first flarf piece. That would probably be my "Sonnet to Sausage," mercifully unpublished all these years.

Mr. Cogito On Upright Attitudes

2009-04-14T22:41:00.003-04:00

1

In Utica
the citizens
don’t want to defend themselves

in town an epidemic broke out
of the instinct of self-preservation

the temple of freedom
has been changed into a flea market

the senate is deliberating
how not to be a senate

the citizens
don’t want to defend themselves
they are attending accelerated courses
on falling to the knees

passively they wait for the enemy
they write obsequious speeches
bury their gold

they sew new flags
innocently white
teach their children to lie

they have opened the gates
through which enters now
a column of sand

aside from that as usual
commerce and copulation

2

Mr Cogito
would like to stand up
to the situation

which means
to look fate
straight in the eyes

like Cato the Younger
see in the Lives

however he doesn’t have
a sword
nor the opportunity
to send his family overseas

therefore he waits like the others
walks back and forth in a sleepless room

despite the advice of the Stoics
he would like to have a body of diamond
and wings

he looks through the window
as the sun of the Republic
is about to set

little remained for him
in fact only
the choice of position
in which he wants to die

the choice of a gesture
choice of a last word

this is why he doesn’t go
to bed
in order to avoid
suffocation in sleep

to the end he would like
to stand up to the situation

fate looks him in the eyes
in the place where there was
his head

Zbigniew Herbert
Translated from the Polish by John and Bogdana Carpenter

Miller in the Times

2009-04-13T21:46:00.002-04:00

Miller Williams was the reason I went to Arkansas, and he sat on my thesis committee as well, so I'm glad to see him get a little love from the NY Times for his latest book.

His latest collection, “Time and the Tilting Earth,” offers many pleasures. Chief among these are Williams’s way of entwining the pure earthiness of language as it’s spoken with rigorous metrical precision, and, analogously, his affection for the quotidian, with an insistence on confronting unanswerable but unavoidable existential problems. In poem after poem, he mingles the low and the high in both form and content, bringing a sense of cleareyed practicality to life’s big questions and a keenly honed poetic technique to the cadences of Arkansas porch talk.

Glad to see that he's still plugging away after all these years.

Regret by John Casteen

2009-04-09T20:30:00.001-04:00

REGRET

This life, it is like conducting
the symphony of a warring country;
the cellist has been shot through the wrist it’s all in,
the horn player has buried his child
and sworn off music.

The conductor will never hear his piece as he hears it.
Sometimes I wake between three and four, these winter nights,
clenching tightly the what-is-not-there,
and I can’t negotiate with that kind of failure.
Outside the wind is roaring at the house.

I had to throw away someone I loved.
The thing that I said at first, about the conductor?
Such a man has no cause to expect redemption.
Fine. So I’ll never understand anything.
So this life, it’s never going to explain anything.

Testing, testing

2009-04-05T15:01:00.001-04:00

We're migrating our sites to a new host and this is one way of checking it out. Fingers crossed.